Saravena, Colombia—Boom! Welcome to Saravena, known locally as “Little Sarajevo.” On February 5, the day after my arrival in this remote town of 30,000 people in Arauca department, I was awakened at 6 a.m. by an explosion. Local urban guerrillas had tossed a grenade at a police patrol a few blocks from my hotel, seriously wounding one officer. Four days earlier, the guerrillas had blown up two electrical towers on the outskirts of town and the power had still not been restored when I arrived.
I came to war-torn Saravena to report on the role of 40 U.S. Army Special Forces troops—30 more are based in nearby Arauca City––who were recently deployed to one of the most hotly contested regions of Colombia to help combat the guerrillas and protect U.S. economic interests in the region. Early last year, the Bush administration proposed a $98 million counterterrorism aid package intended to protect the 478-mile long Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline jointly-owned and operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum and Ecopetrol, Colombia’s state-owned oil company. The aid package calls for soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group to provide counterinsurgency training to Colombian soldiers responsible for protecting the pipeline from rebel attacks.
The U.S. soldiers are billeted in their own compound in the center of the army base located on the outskirts of Saravena adjacent to the airport and less than a mile from the town’s outermost rebel-controlled barrio. The base has been reinforced with concertina wire, sandbag walls and heavily fortified bunkers in an attempt to protect the U.S. troops from possible guerrilla attacks. The elite U.S. soldiers roam freely throughout the base to conduct training exercises and pass their off-duty time playing basketball or downing fresh fruit drinks at the base’s outdoor cafe in an attempt to combat the sweltering tropical heat. Some of these elite troops, many of whom are veterans of Nicaragua’s Contra War, the Panama invasion, the Gulf War and the Afghanistan campaign, find the regulations that restrict them to base frustrating and would like nothing more than to be able to go after the rebels directly. Relaxing in the base cafe, dressed in a white t-shirt and shorts with an M-16 rifle slung over his shoulder, one of the U.S. soldiers admitted, “I don’t like these half-ass wars. If we are going to get involved we should just throw it down.”
While the U.S. troops carry out their mission in the relatively safe confines of the army base, Saravena’s citizens remain defenseless in the face of a military and police crackdown as well as frequent rebel attacks. The devastation wrought on Saravena over the past 15 months is immediately evident upon landing at the town’s small airport where visitors hand their documents to a police officer seated inside the ruins of the terminal. The airport was virtually destroyed when guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) launched nine mortars against the building in an attack last August that left 12 civilians and six soldiers wounded.
A short taxi ride from the airport to the center of Saravena soon reveals more devastation. Substantial popular support in the town’s poor barrios allowed the rebels to attack the center of Saravena with bombs, mortars, grenades or gunfire on 80 different days last year. Many buildings in the vicinity of the central plaza are bombed out ruins, including the town hall, the municipal building and countless stores and businesses. Many of the shops and offices that have not yet been destroyed have been abandoned for fear of attack. As a result, the eerie quiet and desolation of Saravena’s central plaza stands in stark contrast to the hustle and bustle commonly found in most Colombian towns. The principal target of the rebel attacks has been the police station which, ironically, is the only building on that side of the plaza that remains relatively unscathed.
Since September 2002, when President Alvaro Uribe established a “rehabilitation and consolidation zone” in the region, the 120-man National Police detachment in Saravena has managed to gain control of the town’s central commercial zone. Under the presidential decree that established the rehabilitation zone, the military and police were authorized to conduct searches and make arrests without warrants, restrict the movement of civilians and prevent foreign journalists from entering the zone. Uribe’s decree also endowed military commanders with authority that superseded the rule of local elected officials.
The Colombian army used these emergency security measures as a means of securing Saravena for the arrival of the U.S. troops. But on November 26, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that many of these security measures were unconstitutional. As a result, the army and police can no longer search and detain people without warrants—a practice which had resulted in the rounding up and detention of more than 80 people in the local sports stadium––nor restrict access of foreign journalists to the region.
The court also declared that a census the army had conducted was unconstitutional, although the ruling came too late for the people of Saravena as the photographing and fingerprinting of every citizen had already been completed. Major William Bautista Castillo of the Colombian army’s 18th Brigade lamented the loss of the security measures, “All the things we developed in the time the measures were in existence helped us a lot. The census, searches without warrants to capture a suspect, all those rules have now been eliminated. But they were very useful while we could use them.”
As a result of the security measures implemented in the rehabilitation zone, there is now a highly visible 24-hour police presence in a three-block radius around the town’s central plaza, with two policemen dressed in combat fatigues and armed with assault rifles and grenades posted at every corner. Beyond this perimeter, however, the barrios remain firmly in the hands of the urban militias of the FARC and a smaller leftist guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN). In the eyes of many residents and business owners in the town’s center, the security situation has improved. But not surprisingly, residents of Saravena’s marginalized barrios who have been the principal victims of the rehabilitation zone’s emergency security measures and who continue to endure increased army and police harassment claim that the violence has worsened.
While the newly-established police buffer zone has dramatically reduced the number of rebel mortar and bomb attacks against buildings in central Saravena, it has resulted in the killing or wounding of police officers on an almost nightly basis as rebels now toss grenades at the exposed policemen.
Shortly after his arrival in Saravena last July, the commander of Saravena’s National Police detachment, Major Joaquín Enrique Aldana, received a detachment of carabineros (militarized police) that had been specially trained under a program that is currently being run by the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group in Tolemaida in Central Colombia. The relative calm in central Saravena that has resulted from the presence of these carabineros cause Major Aldana to boast, “We have started to defeat the terrorists who hide behind the fear they instill in the people.” Like all of Colombia’s police and military officials since September 11, 2001, the politically savvy commander consciously and repeatedly uses the word “terrorists” when referring to the rebels. Seated behind the desk in his office, which is situated in the front half of the police station that has so far avoided the rebels’ gas cylinder bombs, Major Aldana boldly states, "We have control of the entire town. We have complete control of the commercial center near the police station. And we patrol the other neighborhoods constantly."
The patrols that Major Aldana refers to consist of 40 heavily armed carabineros who wind their way on foot through the rebel-controlled barrios for four hours at a time. The night patrols are especially dangerous because rebels operating under the cover of darkness frequently fire shots or toss grenades at the carabineros.
On February 5, I accompanied a late-afternoon patrol. A few blocks after leaving the police station, we entered the dirt streets of a barrio controlled by the FARC’s 45th Front. The jovial demeanor exhibited by the carabineros during roll call and through the streets of the commercial district soon became serious as we entered rebel-controlled territory. The atmosphere was tense and I found myself constantly anticipating a sudden burst of gunfire or an explosion. The carabineros patrol in two columns, one down each side of the street, each policeman walking with his rifle at the ready 20 yards behind the officer ahead of him. Every time a policeman decides to investigate a vehicle, building or individual, the entire patrol––which sometimes encompasses four or five blocks––comes to a halt. Each carabinero takes cover behind a tree or beside a nearby building in order to guard against a possible ambush while the patrol remains stationary.
The patrol passed into another barrio where many of the houses were adorned with graffiti announcing that the FARC’s 10th Front held sway in this particular part of Saravena. People standing in their doorways or leering over fences eyed the carabineros suspiciously, never offering any verbal greeting to the armed intruders. In a barrio close to the commercial center that was controlled by the ELN’s Domingo Lain Front, the patrol commander stopped to question several indigenous men shooting billiards in a local pool hall. Everyone in the vicinity of the patrol felt the tension when a little girl wandered over to one of the carabineros standing guard across the street from the pool hall. She stood at his feet peering expectantly up at the stern face that was trying to focus his rifle sights on a passersby. The child’s mother nervously ran over and grabbed the bewildered youngster and the two of them quickly disappeared into a nearby house. Soon the patrol was on the move again, much to the relief of the young carabineros who wanted nothing more than to return to the relatively safe confines of the heavily fortified police station.
While the mayor of Saravena, José Trinidad Sierra, welcomes the increased military and police presence in his battered town, he has criticized the national government’s failure to address the region’s social and economic ills. Sitting in the front room of his home, which has served as his office since a rebel attack destroyed the city hall last year, Trinidad apologized for the unprofessional environment in which we were meeting. Above the hullabaloo emanating from his children who were playing nearby, the embattled mayor told me, “The inhabitants of Saravena have been asking the government for social investment. We believe that the public order problem is not going to be solved with the presence of the public forces. It must be complemented with social investment. We have asked the national government to help us generate employment. And also we require investment in education and health.”
Not only have Bogotá and Washington failed to provide effective social and economic assistance to Arauca, but also the Uribe administration recently announced that the department would no longer receive its 9.5 percent share of the nation’s oil revenues. Additionally, local municipalities that contain the Caño Limón oil field will no longer receive their 2.5 percent of oil proceeds. According to Uribe, too much of the oil revenue is ending up in the hands of the rebels through extortion and sympathetic local politicians. Consequently, the president has declared that all future spending of the oil royalties belonging to the Arauca department and local municipalities will be handled by his administration.
In the meantime, while Mayor Trinidad waits to see just what President Uribe intends to do with Arauca’s share of the oil proceeds, Saravena’s frightened residents continue to batten down the hatches on a nightly basis. Once the sun sets on Saravena, the streets soon become eerily quiet and deserted, even in the town’s center where the police maintain their presence on every street corner throughout the night. The few restaurants willing to remain open after dark are all closed up tight by 9 p.m. in anticipation of the almost inevitable explosions and gunshots.
There were rebel grenade, rocket and gunfire attacks against the police on three of the four nights I spent in Saravena. While most of the attacks are short and deadly, a grenade tossed at two policemen on the evening of February 6 escalated into a full-fledged battle. Rapid fire bursts from automatic weapons fire and the thunderous echo of a rebel-fired homemade gas cylinder bomb reverberated through the mostly deserted streets as terrified residents hunkered down behind locked doors. In the police station, Major Aldana was on the phone to the local army commander requesting reinforcements while several officers were busy treating two police carabineros who had been injured in the initial grenade attack.
After more than one and a half hours of fighting, army tanks and troops rolled into town and the rebels withdrew to the barrios. Apparently, a combined force of FARC and ELN urban militias had decided to boldly challenge Major Aldana’s claim that the police “control the entire town.” The attack was also intended as a military statement by the guerrillas on the eve of a U.S. embassy-sponsored press junket to Saravena designed to promote the counterterrorism mission of the U.S. Army Special Forces troops based in the region.
The U.S. soldiers are training troops from the Colombian Army’s 18th Brigade, whose mission includes defending the border with Venezuela, conducting counterinsurgency operations and protecting the oil pipeline. The insignia of the 18th brigade consists of an oil well, and its commander, Brigadier General Carlos Lemus, directs operations from an office inundated with souvenirs bearing the name of the company whose oil it is his mission to protect. Occidental Petroleum contributes both money and logistical support, including transport helicopters, to the Colombian military to assist with the protection of the pipeline. The influence of the U.S. oil company on the 18th brigade was further evidenced when I met with General Lemus at the brigade’s headquarters in Arauca City last August. I had requested permission to accompany an army patrol responding to a rebel attack on the pipeline, but the general said that such a request would have to be approved by Occidental officials.
While General Lemus denies any links between his troops and right-wing paramilitaries belonging to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), there is an emerging paramilitary presence in the region. A local AUC unit, the Arauca Vanquishers Bloc, is believed to have been responsible for 70 percent of the more than 420 political killings––including the assassinations of two local congressmen––in the vicinity of Arauca City last year.[1] The Arauca Vanquishers Bloc regularly maintains a roadblock in the hamlet of Rosario––30 minutes outside of Arauca City on the road to Saravena. While the roadblock was easy for this reporter to locate, and difficult for locals to avoid, the army’s 18th brigade appears to be oblivious to the existence of the highly visible AUC unit.
The paramilitaries arrived in Arauca two years ago; they have a long history of working closely with the Colombian army to protect both domestic and foreign corporations from guerrilla attacks. When I met with Commander Freddy, the leader of the Arauca Vanquishers Bloc, on a small farm in Rosario the day after I had spoken with General Lemus, he explained the AUC’s mission: “The self-defense forces came to Arauca to liberate the people from the guerrillas. We are living in a state of war with the guerrillas; we are not here to combat the state.”
While the paramilitaries are prominent in the vicinity of Arauca City, they have yet to gain a foothold in Saravena. Consequently, it is the army that is challenging the rebels’ decades-long rule of Saravena’s barrios. The 18th brigade regularly deploys its psychological operations unit into the marginalized neighborhoods, ostensibly to wage a battle to win over the “hearts and minds” of local residents.
On the morning of February 5, I witnessed the army’s psychological warfare campaign in action in the barrio of San Luis, which is controlled by an ELN militia group. Soldiers had secured several blocks within the barrio and alertly stood guard while, for the next few hours, Sergeant John Fernando Arenas spewed propaganda against the guerrillas and their militias over a loudspeaker system mounted on top of an army truck:
Every one of the inhabitants has to be conscious of the situation and turn in the terrorists… The militias are trying to recruit our young people; they are only trying to make bad citizens… Make it to those telephones: 889-2031. These telephone numbers are not tapped … The militias only scare people. We have to denounce them through the cooperation network… [The militias] are the terrorists who have caused the most damage to Arauca…Do you think those who call themselves the people’s army are really that?
Some locals eyed the soldiers warily, a few people went about their business as usual, while many residents remained behind closed doors. But there was no escaping the propaganda blitzkrieg. In a bizarre scene that could have been lifted straight out of a Fellini movie, two soldiers dressed in colorful red and yellow clown outfits accompanied by uniformed troops went door to door handing out leaflets offering rewards to residents willing to provide information on rebel activities. Armed with a large bag of candy, the clowns befriended any children they encountered, while nervous parents looked on. At the same time this military circus was taking place, several soldiers busied themselves painting a colorful mural of a sunset over ELN graffiti on a nearby wall. In the end, like the police patrols, this military presence only proved to be a temporary hindrance to the guerrillas who simply melted into the fabric of the community for the few hours the army remained in the area.
Some of the other psychological warfare strategies being implemented by the Colombian army in Saravena are also specifically targeting children. In one such program titled Soldier for a Day, children between three and 12 years of age are brought to the army base every Thursday to play soldier. The activities I observed included Colombian troops and uniformed army psychologists placing camouflage headbands on the heads of the children and painting their faces with camouflage make-up. At the same time, two soldiers dressed in clown suits entertained the children, some of whom appeared to enjoy the charade while others simply appeared bewildered. Throughout the ordeal, the “little soldiers” were continuously bombarded with the requisite pro-army and anti-rebel propaganda. Finally, after a dip in the camp pool, the children were trucked around the base on top of an armored personnel carrier fully equipped with a 50-caliber machine gun for the children’s entertainment.
One army psychologist dressed in camouflage combat fatigues, Paola Alzate Acosta, told me that the program is supposed to help the children cope with traumas caused by the violence they frequently experience in Saravena. According to Alzate, the children “dream about learning how to handle a gun to kill the bad guy in the neighborhood. They dream about learning how to drive a tank to be able to destroy the cylinder bombs.” But the program has another, more immediate, benefit: counseling children from marginalized barrios controlled by the rebels provides the army with valuable intelligence on activities not only within the barrios, but also within the children’s own homes and families. When asked if some of these kids are children of guerrillas, Alzate responded, “In many cases these are children whose parents are in the militias and those children become conflicted about what is right and what is wrong.” She then matter-of-factly added, “In some cases when we put camouflage headbands on them, they say that they can’t take them home because their fathers will yell at them. When those kinds of things happen we try to talk to them to find out what is happening at home.”
Questions have been raised regarding the strategies used by the army to entice children to attend these programs. According to one local woman who requested anonymity for security reasons, she was watching her friend’s children at their house one afternoon when soldiers arrived and said they were taking the kids to a park to see the clowns. The soldiers gave money and candy to the children and accused the woman of being a guerrilla when she refused to the let children go. She said the soldiers “were asking the children about their mother and father,” finally “they came in and checked the house, looking at everything.”
While such psychological warfare and intelligence gathering tactics may contravene the Geneva Convention in regard to the involvement of civilians, especially children, in an armed conflict, they appear to have the support of U.S. military advisers in Colombia. One U.S. Army Special Forces soldier stationed in Saravena emphasized the importance of psychological operations when he stated, “This war is not going to be won with bullets. It’s going to be won by winning the people over to the side of the Colombian army. You are not going to defeat the guerrillas by humping through the jungle like in Vietnam.”
Besides such techniques, the U.S. trainers are also teaching Colombian army units to conduct reconnaissance missions and to wage unconventional warfare. The courses, which are ten weeks long, mark a significant change in U.S. military policy in Colombia. Previously, U.S. aid provided training and equipment to target coca crops, poppy fields and drug processing labs, but the new counterterrorism aid aims to provide the Colombian army with the capability to wage offensive counterinsurgency operations. As a result, instead of waiting to respond to guerrilla attacks against the oil pipeline, the Colombian army will be able to launch offensives against the rebels in the hopes of preventing future pipeline attacks.
The FARC has responded to the arrival of the U.S. soldiers by escalating the levels of violence in the region. In January, four car bombings were carried out in Arauca, killing at least 12 people and injuring 30. Military checkpoints and army patrols were the principal targets of what, at first glance, appeared to be suicide attacks. But it soon became apparent that the bombings were not suicide attacks at all. Mauricio Avandaño Camargo, the driver who survived a January 11 bombing, told authorities that the FARC took two of his brothers hostage and ordered him to drive the car to a specific location and then get out and walk away. Avandaño claims that the rebels detonated the explosives by remote control while he was still inside the car at a military checkpoint.[2] The FARC’s new tactics exhibit a brutality that blatantly violates aspects of international law calling for the protection of unarmed civilians. They also clearly signify a willingness by the rebels to dramatically escalate the levels of violence in the very region where the U.S. troops are based.
For its part, the ELN has also responded to the arrival of U.S. troops in Arauca. In January, the rebel group kidnapped two foreign journalists: U.S. photographer Scott Dalton and British writer Ruth Morris, who were both working on assignment for the Los Angeles Times. Until this incident, foreign reporters covering Colombia’s civil conflict had enjoyed immunity from rebel kidnappings. But initial statements by the ELN declared that the two reporters would not be released until the “political and military situation merited,” which appeared to be a call for the withdrawal of the U.S. troops. In the face of international condemnation, the ELN revised its position and freed the journalists 11 days later. Shortly afterward, the rebel group announced it was implementing an armed blockade of Arauca’s highways from February 10-15 to protest the presence of the U.S. soldiers in the region. As a result, all movement of people and goods between Arauca’s principal towns was paralyzed. One of the two airlines that fly to Saravena cancelled its flights for fear that the rebels would shoot at planes during the blockade. These tactics, along with five attacks against the oil pipeline in the first five weeks of the year, clearly signify a direct military response by the rebel groups to the Bush administration’s war on terror in Colombia.
The U.S. military escalation in Colombia brings Washington one-step closer to direct involvement in this South American country’s decades-old civil conflict. Last September, the guerrillas fired 10 mortars at the army base that now houses the U.S. Army Special Forces troops. The urban militias of the FARC and ELN have repeatedly proven that they can attack Saravena at will, therefore the mere presence of U.S. troops in such a hotly-contested region dramatically increases the possibility of U.S. soldiers becoming directly engaged in combat.
Indeed, the Bush administration’s response to the February 13 downing of a U.S. spy plane in FARC-controlled southern Colombia signifies yet another military escalation. After killing two of the plane’s five-man crew—one Colombian military officer and one U.S. civilian contractor—the FARC took prisoner the three remaining U.S. crewmen, also civilian contractors. U.S. officials deny FARC claims that the contractors were CIA agents, stating instead that the men were working for the Pentagon. President George W. Bush ordered 150 more U.S. troops to the jungles of southern Colombia to help the Colombian military and U.S. Special Forces already on the ground track down the rebels holding the captured airmen.
This latest deployment of troops to Colombia followed on the heels of Bush’s decision to send 1,700 U.S. soldiers to the Philippines to combat Muslim guerrillas in the southern jungles of that country. Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration sent U.S. troops to train the Filipino military as part of Washington’s evolving war on terror. The escalation of the U.S. military mission in the Philippines from an advisory role to combat deployment may set a precedent for a similar expansion of the war on terror in Colombia. Such a scenario would result in a lifting of restrictions limiting U.S. military personnel to an advisory role and allow the Special Forces soldiers in Saravena frustrated with this “half-ass war” to finally “throw it down”—with devastating consequences for Colombians.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Garry M. Leech is the editor of the online journal Colombia Report, www.colombiareport.org, and founder of the Information Network of the Americas. He is also author of Killing Peace: Colombia’s Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention.
NOTES
1. Gary Marx, “Imperiled pipeline gets U.S. troops in Colombia,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2002, p.1.
2. Jeremy McDermott, “Colombian car bomb tactics take a new twist,” Jane’s Terrorism Intelligence Centre, January 17, 2003, www.janes.com/security/international_security/ news/jtic/jtic030117_1_n.shtml.
